Dan Muse

Let’s face it. When it comes to doing business, most people prefer to work with someone they know — or at least someone who knows someone they know. That’s the concept behind LinkedIn and other companies that specialize in social networking. LinkedIn now lays claim to a community of 2 million registered users, according to […]

Touting what it calls the three C’s of CRM, SalesCenter today announced a new version of its Web-based sales force automation application. In addition to configuration and customization, Dave Dabbah, general manager for SalesCenter, said the company “provides a layer of consulting” for businesses that sign on to the service. “We do everything for the […]

Many small businesses are in a perpetual quandary. Because they don’t have deep IT resources, owners and managers need to track down tech info themselves, but they have less time than managers in large enterprises. That’s why many turn to Web-based resources, which are always accessible when the opportunity arises — often at night and […]

If you’re like many small e-businesses, you are always looking for new cost-effective ways to let the world know about your products or services. You now have a new — and free — way to advertise your wholesale or small business related products. goWholesale.com, a search portal that attempts to bring together buyers and sellers […]

How affordable would a Web conferencing service have to be to entice you to give it a try? How about free? That’s the approach Convoq is taking with ASAP Express, a free Web conferencing service announced yesterday. This is a bit of a good news, bad news story. The bad news is that the Web […]

More and more small businesses are turning to independent contractors to provide IT services. If you are one of them, you may want to let the company you work with know about a new hosted network management service that is promising to stop network and system trouble before it happens. HyBlue, a new Seattle-based company, […]

Its retail stores now closed and much of its business and manufacturing operations streamlined, a more focused Gateway is taking aim at Dell’s PowerEdge and Hewlett-Packard’s ML server lines by offering more capabilities at comparable prices. Gateway today announced the Gateway 9510 Series server, which will begin shipping later this week. The midrange system touts […]

It’s common sense to say that small and mid-sized businesses should regularly backup up their data. Still, it’s hardly a common practice. In fact, according to research firm IDC, only about 40 percent of small businesses do it. Mid-sized businesses are only a little better — about 46 percent implement regular backups, according to IDC. […]

In a move designed to help small and mid-sized businesses take advantage of the latest in communications and collaboration products, the software giant today announced Microsoft Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.0. Rather than investing in the hardware to run messaging and collaboration software and the staff to manage it, the hosted service, which […]

Many businesses that use collaboration software can’t imagine life without it. However, some companies that are just getting started with collaboration software can’t imagine what to do with it. Groove Networks’ Director of Communications Ryan Hoppe calls it the “what now syndrome.” Groove, a Beverly, Mass.-based a leader in peer-to-peer collaboration software, is attempting to […]

In the inner circles of the instant messaging (IM) industry, the conversation inevitably comes around to interoperability — that is, getting public networks such as AOL, Yahoo! and Microsoft as well as proprietary systems to share IMs. The thinking is that businesses need to reach beyond the boundaries of their firewalls to talk to customers, […]

Small businesses may appreciate the benefits of Web-based meetings, but they don’t appreciate the costs (often in the tens of thousands) associated with the bellwether services from companies such as WebEx and Microsoft. Once the domain of big business, Web-based conferencing is now within the reach of smaller companies. If you’re looking for a way […]